


Juvenile

by zauberer_sirin



Series: Confessions [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coulson loves Daisy A LOT, Developing Relationship, Dry Humping, F/M, Fluff, Gym Sex, POV Phil Coulson, Romance, Slow Romance, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-15 17:03:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8064808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: In retrospect offering to be Daisy's sparring partner might have been a bad idea.
(Writen for the #byebyehiatus prompt challenge at johnsonandcoulson)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RowboatCop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/gifts).



Daisy lets out a moan of admiration when he shoves her against the wall.

Even though she is not using her powers it has taken Coulson every shred of SHIELD training and experience to be able to get the upper hand in their fight - even momentarily.

“Not bad, Agent Coulson,” she praises him, as she struggles in his grip, not really trying, just checking how well he has her pinned to the wall of the gym. 

He has her pinned pretty well.

He suddenly realizes that might not have been a good idea.

Demoted to regular field agent Coulson knows that he has to keep up, and Daisy offered to spot him at the gym, or he offered to spot her, he’s not sure. Of course he hadn’t thought that getting physical like this with Daisy might be a problem in their current predicament.

“Thank you, agent,” he says, a bit awkwardly, because he is suddenly very aware of how close he’s holding her.

It’s been three weeks since he first kissed Daisy, since they kissed under the rain, since she slept in his safehouse and they kiss over the kitchen table and again, for a long while, after breakfast and before returning to the base. And since then things hadn’t progressed much further than the odd kiss and hug when no one in the base is looking, or cuddling together at the end of the day on the common area couch, as they watch the news, or while Daisy takes out her frustration on some videogame. 

Coulson, he’s ashamed to admit it, is more than fine with their decision not to get any more involved while on the base, their decision to do things properly, in Daisy’s words. The idea of getting more intimate makes him anxious. Daisy is kind and open-minded but she is young and Coulson, even though he knows rationally it wouldn’t be a problem for her, is afraid of not measuring up. He never used to have these doubts, but they’ve been here, inside him, since after he died. A new mistrust of his own body. An awareness of his limitations that wasn’t there before. It only got worse after he lost his hand. This stalling with Daisy, though frustrating (even the odd kiss, the casual touch, raised feelings in him he hadn’t expected, or never knew he was capable of), is also a relief.

But to his defense the main reason why they are in this limbo in their relationship is that they had been _too damn tired_. They are always on the field, Daisy more than anyone, the new Director putting her in the front line at every chance, even though she is still recovering from the wounds on her arm (Coulson suspects, and bites his tongue about it in meetings, that it’s because she’s Inhuman, and the Director considers her more expendable for that). Daisy coming late from missions, having to put ice to her bruises. That has been, mostly, their new dynamic, Coulson nursing her injuries in the kitchen while she eats leftover food, fighting to keep her eyes often. Work doesn’t leave much time for intimacy right now, even without their pact to take things slow. Inhuman are mostly just like regular people, that is good people, and you don’t need superpowers to cause endless damage (Grant Ward taught him that), but having superpowers definitely made the damage easier, and there are after all enough bad guys who also happen to be Inhuman to keep them occupied. The environment of hatred caused by the Sokovia Accords had only exacerbated the conflict with other Inhumans, and Coulson knew it would, which meant extra work (“Extra work, yay,” Coulson thinks in Daisy’s sarcastic voice).

This week had been especially tough, what with the first cases in a wave of disappearances of young Inhumans that both Daisy and Coulson agree are kidnappings with nefarious purposes. Their waking hours had been dedicated to the case, with little room for anything else.

Being her sparring partner might be the most intimate they have been so far, and Coulson hasn’t realized before how much _touching_ there is involved in this sort of training, or how flimsy and thin gym clothes turn out to be. Or maybe it was that he had never had a problem concentrating before.

Daisy wraps her hand over his forearm, where Coulson is applying pressure to stop her from moving. She squeezes to check how solid the grip of his prosthetic is.

“Clever,” she says. “But that’s cheating a bit.”

“We said no superpowers,” he reminds her. “We never said anything about my arm.”

Without the extra help of his enhanced limb he would have never gotten the advantage - and it had taken him a couple of trips down to the mats. He keeps one leg pressed against her thigh, so she has to stay with her legs uncomfortably spread, enough that she won’t try to kick him. It was her kicks what have landed Coulson on his back twice since they began.

Up close it’s easy for him to see how much her fighting style has changed. No longer SHIELD textbook movements. Her training with May, her own quick facility to copy the style of her teammates (there was a lot of May there, yes, but sprinkled with a couple of tricks Coulson would recognize as Bobbi’s, and then the unassuming effectiveness of Mack), there is still a lot of that in her body. But there is something else now. She no longer fights the clean and crisp fights Coulson was taught at the academy. Her movements have become unpredictable, her methods rough and at times unfair. _Like in a street fight_ , Coulson thinks, knowing she learned all this from having to take threats on her own for months, no partner, no backup. The habit of hiding her powers when she’s in the open. An emphasis on not getting hurt because she knew there would be no one there to patch her up, no equipment to heal her injuries, and no time to rest. 

Coulson gets caught up in this painful thought, how the little and big miseries of loneliness have shaped Daisy as a fighter as well, ironically turning her into a better one, harder to crack. more lethal. But the idea still haunts him and he looks at Daisy in the eye as if he could find the secret there, how she can stand it, everything that happens to her. He gets lost in those brown eyes, not for the first time, and his leg slips down a bit, causing Daisy to relax her body as well, until their hips meet for a moment.

She draws in a sharp breath and the mood of the scene changes.

She smirks, noticing it too.

It makes Coulson wonder how it would have been if he had ever sparred with Daisy like this before, when they weren’t together. Would he have discovered his true feelings sooner, had he been exposed to this kind of intimate contact? Was that the reason he never offered to help with her training, the reason he stuck to giving pointers to Ward and May about how to better turn Daisy into an agent?

She tilts her head, pressing her lips in a simulacra of a pout.

“You know, it’s been three days since you last kiss me.”

“It has? It seems unreasonable.”

“Very unreasonable.”

He’s getting the first glimpses of what a teasing Daisy looks like. She is as fierce at loving as she is at anything else, but she is careful about it, only showing herself by degrees. Coulson likes coaxing that out of her and works hard for it - works hard to make her feel at ease with him, even if it’s just cracking jokes he knows are really bad. Her good nature, her playfulness, he is excited to see more of it. And good God part of him is overwhelmed just imagining how all those qualities of hers would feel like if they were in bed together, not just stealing a couple of kisses before the team walks into the room.

“What are you going to do about it?” she presses, as if she fears he might not take the bait.

It the worst possible place to explore their feelings, he knows, and he knows she knows, this semi-public place that is not public enough to be a deterrent.

But Daisy asking him to kiss her, he’s not going to reject her. He brushes his nose against hers first and lifts the arm he is not using to pin her against the wall (not that he needs to, anymore, and he loosens the grip a bit), his fingers sliding through her hair. She tastes of sweat, an unfamiliar kind of kiss just yet; Coulson has tasted fear and exhaustion and coffee and ashes and pizza and blood in her kisses. It’s the first time he tastes sweat, hot and salty, and it makes him curious to taste more of her, all the flavors.

She moans into his mouth and Coulson knows it’s not enough for either of them. He lowers his arms, freeing Daisy’s chest, stroking one of her breasts through the fabric of her top and her sports bra.

“Oh, wow, that’s… yeah,” she says, eyes wide, shocked that he would do something like that.

He freezes, looking at her to check it’s a good kind of shock. Now her arms are free and Daisy loops one around his back, pulling him against her while she arches her own body, until their hips touch again.

Coulson presses his forehead to the wall of the gym, groaning against Daisy’s neck.

His gym sweats doesn’t allow for much of a mystery and he’s sure Daisy can feel his cock hard and hot against her thigh, just like he can feel the heat of her even through her clothes.

He knows this is wrong. Anyone could walk in on them and it’s wrong and Daisy deserves better - _god, she deserves everything_ , she deserves so much and Coulson yearns to show her how much she deserves - but he can’t stop, and he can’t stop Daisy from wrapping one leg under his ass and drawing him closer.

They were sparring just a minute before, he was helping her regain flexibility in the arm, they were _taking it slow_ , how did it all end up like this so suddenly… But Coulson needs to be honest with himself, he doesn’t want to st-

“I don’t want to stop,” Daisy whispers in his ear, sucking his earlobe into her mouth. 

He drops his hand until he can make out her ribs under the top.

“Then don’t,” he tells her, turning his head to catch her lips.

He pins her hard against the wall again, this time with his hips.

She whimpers when he sucks on the tip of her tongue. “Shit,” she mutters, shutting her eyes close. Coulson grins against the wet skin of her cheek, because Daisy, for all her reputation and her unusual past, doesn’t often swear. Coulson’s smile freeze when she starts moving against his body, settling his cock between her legs.

He wordlessly calls her name, and the juvenile of it all only seems to make him more aroused - he has vivid flashes of Saturday evenings on his mother’s couch when he was a teenager, desperately making out with girlfriends and boyfriends, trying to get an extra moment of physical contact before she came home from work and took them both to dinner with her. It’s unbearably nostalgic, and he acutely aware he doesn’t have the body of a seventeen year old ever again.

She slides up and down the wall, rubbing herself against Coulson’s erection. He grabs her by the waist, slipping his thumb under her top, feeling the hot and sweaty strip of skin. Taunt by training and fighting, but still that softness of someone not even thirty years old, touching her skin makes Coulson feel inappropriate, like he’s let this go too far. 

But he loves her so much, and it’s so, _god_ , so pure, like he has never felt before. How can all that love be wrong or inappropriate? And Daisy loves him like that. He has no idea why or what he did to deserve it, but she does. Coulson can see it in her eyes, even now, when they are clouded with lust, there’s something just selfless and immaculate in how Daisy loves him. It makes him swallow, it makes him want to deserve it, it makes him push his hips harder against hers.

“Fuck, Coulson, I-” she lets out, strained, when he hits an obvious sweet spot. Her voice makes Coulson want to drop to his knees and press his mouth against her, through her shorts. But that would mean abandoning his current position, that would mean _stopping_ for a moment and he can’t do that, and Daisy has her fingers tightly clasped around his shoulders, she would never let him go anyway.

“God, Daisy, _please_.”

He’s not sure what he is begging for here, but Daisy drops her head and closes her mouth around the spot of skin where his neck meets his shoulder, sucking carefully as she rolls her hips hard against him. He thinks he might make a fool of himself right in that moment, then he decides he’s been making a fool of himself for a long time so there’s no point in faking some dignity now. He keeps kissing this extraordinary and unfair young woman as he brings his hands under her ass and lifts her up, moving her legs so that they’re wrapped around his waist. Daisy’s chest is heaving, he can hear the racing heartbeat in his ears, under the sound of his own pulse. It’s a good thing he won’t last long, Coulson thinks with self-deprecating humor excusing his real fears, because there’s no way he can support Daisy’s weight against the wall for more than a couple of minutes at most, especially when she starts pushing down on him, her fingertips digging between his shoulderblades.

Their limbs tangle messily, skin slippery against skin, their gym clothes soaked with sweat and arousal. They come at the same time, something that hasn’t happened to Coulson in years, as if they were in perfect synch.

After he has carefully lowered her down so her feet touch the mats again Coulson rests his head on Daisy’s shoulder, letting the arousal ebb away peacefully, as he starts feeling vague embarrassment about the sweat cooling on his skin, the mess inside his sweatpants. He wants to stay like this forever just so he doesn’t have to acknowledge the state of him, and so he can keep breathing alongside Daisy, his body still cushioned by her warmth.

“I’m sorry,” Daisy says and he can tell by his voice something’s wrong.

He looks up and she looks so upset that Coulson worries he’s hurt her.

She untangles herself from his embrace, but by the way she is so careful moving his arms away it’s like she is the one worrying she might have _hurt him_. Coulson is completely lost. He knows he’s scared.

“Sk- Daisy, what’s wrong?”

Daisy stops a moment and looks at him with soft, loving eyes.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-”

Coulson is not sure how she does it - he should have followed her, should have caught her, why didn’t he - but in a moment he blinks and she is gone, and he is alone in the gym.

 

+

 

He debates with himself whether he should go check up on her or leave her alone. Historically he has done the last often, but maybe that’s not an option now that they are involved in a more personal way. Or, in retrospect, maybe it had been fear what had stopped him from coming to Daisy more often in the past. He has decided not to be that kind of coward anymore, so after he takes a well needed shower he walks to her bunk.

Coulson doesn’t want to impose, though, so he sends her a text telling her he’s coming before he knocks on her door. So she is waiting for him. She is sitting on the bed, looking distressed, locks of wet hair hiding her eyes. She has changed into an oversized sweater that almost doesn’t let Coulson see her hands, and some long sweats.

He takes one look around her room. It’s bare, no recognizable Daisy item in sight, except for her laptop. There’s no trace of the objects he has come to associate with her: the Hula girl figure, a blanket that’s been with her since she left her van, the bracelets and necklaces that she normally keeps neatly arranged over her desk. There’s none of those things anywhere Coulson can see. It seems like a temporary crashing place to her, and Coulson wonders if it’s habit from all the months on the road, or if Daisy isn’t sure the new Director won’t change his mind and decide that it’s not a good thing after all that an Inhuman is part of SHIELD, kick her out. Coulson wants to tell her she has a home, independent of SHIELD or Levels or missions, but now it’s not the time.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

Coulson shakes his head, stopping her. He asks if he can sit by her on the bed, silently. He takes a spot on the edge of the mattress, not wanting to crowd her. He’s fantasized often in the past weeks with being in Daisy’s bunk, staying in here, but that’s the furthest thing from his mind right now.

“What happened? Did I do something wrong?” he asks, more scared than any other time in his life, terrified by the idea of having hurt her.

“What? No. It’s me, I’m sorry.”

“You said that. What are you sorry for?”

“For ruining our… uh, first time,” she says, looking away at the last two words and Coulson kind of agrees it sounds a bit ridiculous.

He frowns.

“Ruining…?” he repeats, but focuses on something else first. Something he had taken note of when Daisy was just his agent and he was just her boss, years ago (she was never _just_ that, though, he suddenly realizes, and feels grateful it’s not too late for such a realization). “ Also I was there too. Why is it just your fault if anything was ruined?”

“Because…” she makes a gesture with her left hand, and Coulson knows what it means - he knew this about her from the first week he met her, when he was still profiling her, _because everything is my fault_.

He nods, understanding.

“And why do you think anything is ruined?” he asks.

“Because I know what you want,” she says. Coulson tilts his head, crawling closer to her on the bed. “You’ve probably already planned something super romantic and classy with dinner under the candlelight, and slow music, and like… bouquets of flowers. That sort of thing.”

He gives her a tiny smile.

“You make me sound like such a cliché.”

“No, I like the cliché,” she tells him. Softer: “I’ve never had the cliché.”

Coulson looks down, drawing circles on her blanket with his thumb. SHIELD issued bedclothes, she hasn’t even gotten something better or more personal just yet. It makes Coulson _yearn_ , but he’s not sure what he’s yearning for. He looks up again.

“I did have something planned,” he confesses. Daisy doesn’t look surprised. “Music, candles, an intimate dinner. I was having some trouble choosing the flowers, though.”

“Oh, Coulson,” she sighs, looking guilty.

“I’m not explaining myself too well,” he says, clearing his throat and touching the front of his shirt. “What happened in the gym… it wasn’t a bad thing.”

She looks unconvinced. “It wasn’t?”

“Daisy, I’ve never…”

Coulson bursts out laughing.

“What the-?”

She looks at him like he has completely lost the plot.

“I’m sorry,” he says, wanting to make it clear he is not laughing at her, but the laughter won’t stop long enough to clarify. “What the hell got into me? That was very _unprofessional_.”

Daisy shows a tiny, confused smile, but he can tell by the way her shoulders begin to relax that it’s relieving to hear him joke about it.

“Yeah, it kind of was,” she agrees.

“I’ll say,” Coulson draws his hand over his face hopelessly, still laughing. Dry-humping a fellow SHIELD agent against the gym wall. It should be pretty worrying. “I must have gone crazy. I’ve never done anything like that.”

“No?”

“No. And I’ve trained with many _handsome_ SHIELD agents, I promise.”

“I believe you,” she says, sounding slightly and irrationally jealous.

He shakes his head again, replaying the events at the gym, unable to believe it was really him who did those things.

“But today I… what am I, a horny teenager?”

He keeps laughing and suddenly Daisy joins him with some chuckling of her own.

“Yeah, that was pretty embarrassing,” she says, moving to the end of the bed so they can sit together. Coulson slides his right arm around her in a very loose embrace, stroking her back for a few minutes. She sighs. “But I’m still sorry.”

“No, Daisy-”

Her serious look when she turns to face him stops Coulson’s words.

“I wanted it to be special, to make you feel special,” she tells him.

It makes something fill up in his chest, the idea that Daisy is trying to make him feel that way. He doesn’t want to be a cliché, and he is the one who should be trying to make her feel those things, but Coulson can’t remember anyone saying something like that to him. He can’t remember anyone valuing him so much.

“It was special,” he assures her, moving his hand to the back of her neck, stroking the wet hair. “Because you are.”

Daisy furrows her brow a bit, her mouth half-open, like she didn’t expect to hear that and is a bit confused about why Coulson would say it. 

“Coulson…” she starts, lifting her fingers to his cheek. “No.” She shakes her head. “ _Phil_.”

He doesn’t mean to smile in such a dumb way but he really likes it when she uses his first name. He should have told her to call him that years ago.

Daisy makes a small noise of frustration as she scrapes her nails a bit across his jaw, and reaching to kiss him. He reacts too late and by the time he tries to kiss back Daisy is already pulling away and he is left chasing her mouth like an idiot.

“When did you get so cute?” she says.

He makes an offended face.

“I think I have _always_ been cute.”

She grabs him by the back of the head and kisses him, passionately, drawing teeth across his lips when she lets him go, leaving him breathless for a moment.

“Okay but when did you get so… _hot_?”

He makes a groaning noise he hopes it’s somewhat sexy.

“I definitely have always been hot,” he tells Daisy.

She laughs, a wonderful full sound, and Coulson doesn’t mind being ridiculous. He also needed someone to coax this from him, the bad jokes and the tenderness and feeling horny like a teenager and the dry humping and feeling so much love that his chest hurts - Daisy makes him feel guilty about every person he’s loved before her, because he should have given them _this_ , he could have, he had it in him, and he didn’t. 

He tightens his grip, using one arm to drag Daisy closer her, until she practically has her legs draped over his lap. 

They break the kiss slowly, and softly, dropping quick pecks on each other’s lips as they pull apart. Then moving closer again, kissing some more, repeating it all over.

“Am I still getting the candlelit dinner and the flowers and the music?” Daisy asks, her hands laced behind Coulson’s neck, such a romantic touch - he wonders when _she_ got so cute, he swears he hadn’t noticed before.

“Try stopping me,” he assures her, smirking against her mouth.


End file.
